Another One Bites The Dust: On The Richard Blumenthal News And The Politics Of Mendacity

What is it with lawyers this week? It wasn't bad enough for your favorite Radical to be read out of the community of queer scholars yesterday for reductive identity politics by a hotshot New York law professor who does not hide her sexual orientation (which could be described as....?) There is worse news, at least for the people of Shoreline.

This morning, I scooped up the paper of record from my front porch to discover that Richard Blumenthal has lied by omission and commission about his military service during the Vietnam war. Is this a crime? No. But whether by commission, omission, or inference, coyness around stigmatizing issues -- such as evading military service to promote one's career -- is, as Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy would say, "mendacity!"

As we historians are aware, it is also sleazy. As in the even more puzzling case of Pulitzer Prize-winning Joseph Ellis, I don't think anyone has ever asked Richard Blumenthal if he served in Vietnam: he just offered it up.

Blumenthal has responded to the New York Times "that he had misspoken about his service during the Norwalk event and might have misspoken on other occasions. 'My intention has always been to be completely clear and accurate and straightforward, out of respect to the veterans who served in Vietnam,'" he said.

The yuck factor on this is pretty high, and the political costs may be too. While this event is dissimilar to the Spitzer call girl scandal (in that lying is only a crime under certain circumstances), it demonstrates a similar contempt for voters that will be hard to put aside on election day. Other than the fact that there seems to be a whole generation of ambitious white men who are now embarrassed by the strings they pulled to evade Vietnam (which is why I took particular delight in Dick Cheney's unbuttoned and nasty honesty when he snapped that he had "better things to do" than fight in Vietnam), it is stunningly arrogant that Blumenthal thought he could leave the misimpression that he was a combat veteran and not get caught eventually.

For those of you who don't keep up with Connecticut politics (and why should you? The intricacies of political corruption in the Nutmeg State are so difficult to follow that it is hard to remember which mayor was indicted for what), Blumenthal should have been a shoe-in for Christopher Dodd's open Senate seat. But this is a real blow to an already troubled campaign, because here we have another driven and competitive man who -- by lying about something essentially unimportant -- now appears to have contempt for all of us. The outcome of this may be that a state that perpetually returns a veto-proof Democratic majority to its own legislature, and where even many of hte Republicans are still liberal, may soon be represented in Washington by two conservatives: Joe Lieberman and Linda McMahon, the founder and CEO of the fantastically successful pseudo-sports league, World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc..

It is a puzzle what is wrong with Blumenthal. He has been a good attorney general for twenty years, and was believed to be unbeatable. But his campaign has been uninspired and clumsy: this is just the latest and most boneheaded manifestation of a candidate who doesn't seem to know what he is doing. And while The Daily Caller is claiming that this information about Blumenthal's false claims to comba service was fed to the Times by a McMahon campaign that is functioning like a well-oiled wrestler, my question is: why shouldn't the McMahon people have revealed this? Why turn the stigma back on them?

Ask the Radical: Blogging and The Untenured Academic

Leaving the country often has the happy effect that people stop sending email to me almost entirely. Why sabbatical doesn't accomplish this I do not know, particularly given the vivid bounce-back I composed this time around. Only the chair of my department removed my from the distribution list in September, but I am pleased/dismayed to see that now everyone else has too. Perhaps while I was still state side some secret hope was cherished by many colleagues that I would, in fact, come to advertised meetings of various kinds? If so, I am happy to say that they have not taking to dashing their brains on the flagstones in despair that their coy invitations have gone unanswered.

Since arriving in Cape Town, South Africa, the most sustained correspondence I have had to date is with a group of very capable people who are taking care of my affairs (dog and house) while I am away. We have been in correspondence about the circumstances of a mysterious "alarm event," as ADT Security calls it which, as it turns out, was probably caused by my efforts to draft-proof the front door. But that is all.

Anyway, the lack of email allows me to catch up on messages I have failed to respond to all fall, either because they were too complicated, or because I was ambivalent about them in some way, or because I didn't know what to say. For example, the following questions were asked by a graduate student who heard me and several other bloggers do a panel several months ago. Since there is no point responding to the actual person (as the date of the assignment s/he wanted the information for is long past) I will answer these questions publicly:

1. What are the challenges non-tenured professors face when deciding to keep a personal blog?

Not using the blog to: a) spend most of your time venting about the oppressive condition of being you; b) publish humorous pieces that are just another way to express your boundless rage at those who offend you; c) say witty things about your students that portray them to a national audience at their most foolish and naive; d) waste so much time blogging, reading blogs, commenting on blogs and checking your Site Meter that you don't write anything else; and e) blog constantly about your cats (even though they are very cute and do twee things to distract you from working.)

2. What were your main concerns before you exposed your identity on your blog?

Unfortunately, I had no concerns. This is why I made a some critical errors (see 1a, 1b,and 1c above) that required varying levels of apology to others. I probably would have done d) and e) as well, except that I write about eight hours a day when left to my own devices, I no longer participate in memes, and I have no cats.

3. Do you think that blogs should be considered, in any respect, when a professor has yet to attain tenure?

Since the discipline in which I hold tenure (history) has barely dealt with electronic publishing at all as part of the promotion process, and also has a mixed record on how it regards pre-tenure scholarship published to a trade audience, I would hope that we would not start having a conversation about blogs that was not preceded by one that addressed these other critical issues. But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. Would I hold a blog against someone? Sure! If I was certain that a person had been caught in a huge bloggy lie -- plagiarism, seducing people on line by pretending to be someone else, and masquerading as a variety of different, malicious sock puppets on their own and other peoples' blogs are three examples that come to mind -- it would cause me to wonder about that person's general integrity and scrutinize other aspects of the tenure case a bit more carefully for similar flaws. It has been my unhappy experience that people who lie don't just do it in one context, and they tend to keep doing it. I stumbled onto the website of someone whose first book was plagiarized in the manuscript stage (although when this was pointed out, innocence was claimed and the problems were at least partly rectified.) Many years later, the web page was full of flamers about said person's personal history that were entirely irrelevant to scholarship but that fabricated a far more dashing past than the individual actually had. Honesty in personal relations strikes me as equally, if not more, important than scholarly integrity, since in most of our daily work we count on people to be honest in all their relationships.

When The Radical Hits The Road: Dispatches From The People's Republic Of Berkeley

Every time I fly to the left coast and feel this disoriented I try to remember that getting from Shoreline to San Francisco back in 1848 took between six and eight months, depending on whether one went overland or took the water route. Of course I feel disoriented: I deserve to feel disoriented, since it is actually absurd to travel that far as fast as I did.

Where am I? Why am I here? Oh.

Well, I'm in Berkeley, where I have never been before, although I have visited San Francisco about four times, and every time I do I phone Mrs. Radical and say, "We've got to move here." Actually, she made the same phone call to me a few months back. And while the part of Berkeley I am in (at least so far) doesn't seem as spiffy as the parts of San Francisco I have been in, the short walk from the hostel where I am staying to Telegraph Avenue was a reminder that there are some places in the world that have not been homogenized and upgraded for the wealthy. I walked by People's Park, which is still decorated with a home made sign, and where they have not fenced in the grass to keep people from hurting it by sitting down and reading a book. There seem to be a fair number of homeless people living there as well, something that is no longer allowed in Tompkins Square Park, a similarly radical and communal space on the Lower East Side of New York during the 1960s and 1970s.

The other thing they have on Telegraph Avenue is culture. I searched "Berkeley" at Indiebound before I left, and this place has nineteen independent bookstores. Nineteen. There are twenty-eight in New York (but that is counting all the Museum bookstores), and there is exactly one in Shoreline, home of a world-class university -- pardon me, two, if you count the used book store operated by the Bryn Mawr College alumni association. And having only walked five blocks of Telegraph, already I have found two record stores. They sell actual vinyl, as well as CD's. I have also located three head shops, which have in the window an impressive collection of bongs, a variety of products to clean the bong, and so on. I took a look around and I do not think finding something to smoke in the bong would really put a person out either.

Oh, yeah. And if there was any doubt in my mind that I wasn't in Kansas anymore Toto, after eating a great Mexican dinner for peanuts at Mario's La Fiesta, I walked into Moe's Books and William Vollman was giving a reading from his new book Imperial.

Everything smells of patchouli. Decades of patchouli.

Anyway, back to business. I am here to do some research for the next three days, and then go to another history camp (a different history camp than the one I attended last summer.) So more about that later. But let me just say: if you are reading this, and you are a friend of mine, and you ever hear that I am considering buying a ticket on Southwest Airlines, please remind me that on the five hour flight from Big Regional Airport to Las Vegas, the chief of the flight attendants performed an ongoing stand-up comedy routine. I missed much of it, thanks to the Bose noise canceling headphones that I had buyer's remorse about three weeks ago but now am thanking the Goddess and Dr. Amar G. Bose for. But the half hour at the beginning of the flight and the half hour at the end of the flight were agonizing, perhaps more so because the man next to me was working on his computer, and had his left elbow jammed in my side; and the (very large) man behind me had his enormous, bare foot up on my other armrest.

What is it about men and space?

Oh I know, my conservative critics will say that I want socialized this and socialized that, but that I have no taste for the volk. Well, I have to admit that my occasional distaste for The People does give me pause: the jolly camp counselor routine is not my bag, nor is the dirty foot in my face thing something I would endure again without delivering a carefully prepared speech to the offender. But I'll tell you one thing: Southwest knows how to get people where they are going, and on time too. In fact, they might want to consider hiring Zenith grad Herb Kelleher to run national health care, because every time he tinkers with his business model it works better. For example, I still find it disconcerting not to have an assigned seat, and I have always hated standing in those lines. On the other hand, you have to queue for every airline. And because the lines to board Southwest planes are no longer free-form (everyone has an assigned place in line, which means seating is first-come, first-serve and people settle where it is easiest once the best seats are full) people become naturally more orderly and rational in how they board the plane. I have never seen planes loaded as efficiently as the two I was on today. It literally took about twenty minutes from the time they started to load to the moment the plane pushed off from the gate, and because they still allow you to check one bag free, there wasn't the added hazard on each end of worrying about whether someone was going to drop a suitcase on your head. Furthermore, although other airlines allow you to pick a seat (aisle, please) it is simply the illusion of choice, unless you are in business class or first class, since more often than not your seat changes on the day of the flight and you end up sandwiched between two babies. So having an assigned seat is actually faux privilege; and certainly not a privilege worth fighting for if Southwest can get me in a seat, any seat, more efficiently and get me to my destination on time.

So that assigned seat is kind of analogous, if you think about it, to the increasingly fragile privilege having private health insurance. Maybe you get what you need, but because other people are being treated in the emergency room, your local hospital goes bankrupt. Or you pay through the nose to make sure you are protected from catastrophe, but then they deny coverage for this and that, and you just pay, and thank your lucky stars that you didn't need an experimental brain transplant or something that would be really expensive and force you to live under a bridge.

I think some folks down on Telegraph Avenue may have already had uninsured brain transplants: I'm going to inquire into that tomorrow when I mosey down there for breakfast, but it sure looks like it.

And then off to the archives. Wish me luck.

The Radical Goes To A Genteel Academic Conference (Disguised As A Blogger Meetup)

I just got back from the Little Berks, which is a weekend conference composed of the group of people who organize the Big Berks every three years. One of the things we do in the meeting immediately following the conference is elect the new President. I am happy to say that the results of the election can now be revealed: the new President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians is Kathleen Brown, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She replaces Ruth Mazo Karras, Professor of History from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Ruth has done a great job, and Kathy will too.

There were many highlights of the weekend, but Yours Truly had the pleasure of being on a history blogging panel with Clio Bluestocking and Knitting Clio. It was a real pleasure to meet both of them, and Knitting Clio really does knit. She was working on what looked like a baby blanket while she was there, and braved a cold to participate. About Clio Bluestocking I cannot write, as she is pseudonymous, but suffice to say it is always a special pleasure to find out who someone "really is." Heather, at least, I had googled some months back. Both women have a dry sense of humor, and the panel was a great success.

(By the way, one of the big topics after the panel, when we were all sprawled on queen-sized hotel beds waiting for the new Tina Fey sketch on SNL was: who is Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce III? You may be gone, but you are not forgotten, old man. I was grilled as to whether I had ideas as to who he might be: I do, indeed, have ideas -- good ones, I think -- but explained that it is not only against the Blogger Ethic to divulge names, but that it is equally wrong to provide clews in the form of speculation as well.

My contribution was entitled Tenured Radical Speaks; or, What the Historian Learned When She Went to the Blogosphere, and it should be thought of as both an early blogiversary post, and a big, thankful shout out to all the real and virtual friends who have encouraged me along the way. I reprint excerpts below:

Almost two years ago, I started writing a blog called Tenured Radical. This means that today I am fast approaching what is known among my kind as my second blogiversary. In that first post, on October 17, 2006, I assumed that every academic would understand the title of the blog as an ironic gesture. Nonetheless, I explained to an as yet unknown audience that “long ago, when the new right decided to undermine the intellectual foundations of the nation, one of the big charges made by radical neocons was that universities were full of ‘tenured radicals’ who were indoctrinating the youth of America. The not so big secret, of course, is that universities and their faculties are far from radical, and that tenure is one of the features of university life that makes academics cautious at best, conservative at least. We need to change that….if you keep reading this blog,” I promised, “you will get some insight into the mysteries of the system, and what kind of people folks turn into if they don't keep ironic distance.”

“That's why I'm blogging,” I concluded. “Ironic distance….Because frankly, boys and girls, being an academic isn't as much fun as it used to be, and I think we need to do something to change that.”

Going back to read some of those early posts, I am amazed that a forum was created in my lifetime that allowed a person to announce an agenda and begin to self-publish for free; mildly embarrassed at some of the things I put up and the reasons I put them up (although some of the same things are wicked funny), and more than a little proud of what I have accomplished as a writer and a public intellectual over the last twenty-four months. I have learned a great many things that I never would have learned had I not started blogging, including how to sit down and knock out a piece like this in a few hours, do a couple quick revisions, and feel pretty good about putting it out there for a lot of people I respect to critique.

I also think a great deal more than I used to about how technology alters public culture and provokes democratic change, as well as about what it means to create accessible literary arenas where people can disagree about important ideas. I think about what it means to compile an electronic archive that one can re-write almost indefinitely (in fact, Nancy Cott, Director if the Schlesinger Library, is currently working with her staff on a project to archive feminist blogs permanently, which will cause a blog like mine to ultimately be “fixed” in a way it never will be while it is up on Blogspot.) I think about anonymity, since most bloggers and many people who comment on blogs, are anonymous. I myself began blogging anonymously, and then stopped, something I will say something more about later if you are interested – and while I have a strong position about the dangers of anonymity, it also has an important place in academic life in allowing senior people to hear things they would not otherwise be told....

....Not inconsequentially, my persona as the Tenured Radical (who also calls herself TR) was launched during a period in my life that I would characterize as a moment of professional crisis and self-doubt, a time that I happily no longer feel any need to dwell on. But my flippant call in my inaugural post for “ironic distance” and “fun” was as close as I could get at the time to saying what I really felt, which was that if I couldn’t resolve my anger and frustration at how my writing had been purposely trashed as part of a departmental political struggle, I would need to do something else for a living that did not require publishing or writing, and fast. I can hint at the extent of this existential crisis by adding that, in addition to exploring the blogosphere, I was also having lively conversations with the dean of admissions at the Yale Law School.

Now, some of you are going to say “Aha! Just what I thought! Blogs are not writing, or scholarship. They are therapy!” Well, no. I was in therapy, and lots of it. What I needed to do was to learn to write all over again with confidence, grace, authority and wit. I needed, in short, to learn to have fun again. And that was one of the most important things this historian learned when she went to the blogosphere.

Blogging is, first and foremost about writing, and writing in a way that foregrounds play as well as intellect. This makes blogging fundamentally different from how we were all brought up to write in history school, which is that writing was first and foremost “our work.” Think about it: one of the earliest conventions we learn as graduate students is to greet a person we don’t know, not by asking “what are you writing?” but, “What are you working on?” In a book I would recommend to all of you, which I read shortly after I began blogging, Ann Lamott’s Bird By Bird, Lamott (who is not a blogger, but sort of writes like one) goes on at often hilarious length about the difficulties of taking on a writing life as one’s work. They are all difficulties that are very familiar to historians and, I would wager, often accentuated by the general condition of being women working in institutions that are sexist to a greater or lesser degree (something by the way that we don’t talk about much any more except by sharing anecdotes.) Among the difficulties addressed in the book are being simply unable to write because of an incident, or incidents, of writing trauma in the past (check!); ordinary forms of attention deficit disorder that cause you to interrupt writing to feed the dog, do the laundry, watch TV (check!); the problem of getting useful, accurate, and swift feedback so that you can tell whether what you have written is good or bad (check!); wanting to have fun instead (check!); and difficulty in keeping a continuous focus on one’s work, a focus that cannot be achieved if one does not write every day (check! And check!)
Now, part of why this book appeals to me is that Lamott talks about very difficult things (like having someone tell you for malicious reasons that what you have written is a horrible book when in fact you are fairly sure it is a good book) in a funny, and not a tragic, way. That was very helpful to me because it wasn’t just that I had been traumatized by such an incident, it is that there is virtually no academic script that doesn’t relate obstacles in one’s writing career as having a tragic and permanently damaging outcome. Such outcomes might include the indefinite delay of a well-deserved promotion, as in my case; but there are also worse outcomes: people lose jobs, or –worse, if you really imagine yourself as a writer – you never write again, even if you do keep your job. And what Lamott argues is that there is no way to solve this problem but to write.

Write everyday.

Blogging helped me do that. As I did I began to write little essays about the condition of our lives and the work we do, and people responded to them: essays about teaching, about the dilemmas of the twenty-first century university, about what it meant to be a good senior colleague, and most of all – some of my most popular posts – the evils of the tenure system and a job market clogged with good people who can’t find work. One result of these essays was I got something from blogging that I never anticipated: new colleagues! For surely, part of the trauma of my temporarily derailed professional life was discovering that there were a small number of people I worked with who were really willing to take the time to really damage my reputation as a writer and scholar if they could – not just take the time, but commit to that project. Then there were the bulk of my colleagues at Zenith, who really came through for me, but over a period of years, paradoxically became yet another reminder that I lived in a world that was perhaps permanently divided between friends and enemies.

What blogging allowed me to do primarily, however, was to think seriously and productively about what brought me to this profession in the first place, and work specifically to make that thing happen in a new way. For me, what I have referred to elsewhere as “my second career at the same institution” has also caused me to think seriously about how I got to this point and what I want out of writing. Most important, because of blogging, I write every day, something that makes it possible to be a writer all the time, not just on weekends or on sabbatical, as I often did when writing was the “work” that came last because it required so much more focus than everything else. And this has reshaped my writing habits substantially. Time spent doing other things (teaching, say, or chairing) is time when I am taking a break from writing, not the other way around. Even if large projects are completed slowly, to write every day is to keep continuity in my creative habits that nurtures a sense of connection to my writing as primary work – not work that gets done when my work for everyone else is finished.

As a blogger, I also get to be a historian who engages regularly with contemporary history, which is a messy and exhilarating business. Those of you who follow Tenured Radical, know that in addition to writing about the past, I get to be a cultural critic, essayist, unrepentant goad to right-wingers and faux Dear Abby for young historians. That said, this kind of cultural work on the internet is considered highly suspect by many scholars I know, in part because there are virtually no rules that govern blogging, and the university world is obsessed with rules and the respectability that comes with following the rules. Blogging is also an activity associated most strongly with the young, which makes a middle aged scholar-blogger even more suspect as serious intellectual. I have had conversations with some of my colleagues in which you would have thought they were talking to someone who had taken up competitive skateboarding at the age of fifty.

It is the best kind of middle-aged crisis, I think. While blogging has involved me in some dicey interactions in the university world, it has also included me in a diverse intellectual circle of people, most of them younger than I, and many of whom are graduate students or working adjunct. In other words, my new colleagues are people I really wouldn’t know otherwise, and I have to tell you, I learn a lot from them. This, in turn, has allowed me to re-engage with my old colleagues in a freer, and sometimes pleasantly detached, way, and with a sharpened sense of consciousness about what higher education ought to be doing.

Blogging also allows me to write short pieces, work on form, voice, and getting complex ideas across to an audience that I need to entice in order to keep them reading. I sometimes compare it to a pianist playing scales: to the extent that blogging is not, perhaps, the most serious scholarly form, to take it seriously is to become a better writer. But best of all, I am read every day and my readers write back. They tell me what they think, and sometimes they tell me that my writing made a difference to them. Sometimes they get angry at me, and because of that I have become a keener listener and also grown a tougher hide. I have come to terms with something that is often difficult to face in the scholarly world, particularly given our systems of high-stakes evaluation: that sometimes there are people who really hate what you think is your best work. This, I will say in conclusion, has made me a braver writer.

And it has made me a historian who is once again having fun.

Bodies That Matter:* When the Scholar Becomes the Text

I admit it. Every once in a while I go on a Facebook binge. What triggered it the other night I truly do not recall, but I sent friend requests to former students of mine with whom I had worked closely, as well as one student I never taught, but know pretty well because we had a fellowship at a Zenith Humanities Center and we are both now bloggers. I added a colleague from the Economics department who I've always liked for her dry wit (what was she doing with a Facebook page? What am *I* doing with a Facebook page?) and it was only after I clicked the Friend request that I thought, "Aw -- what if she doesn't actually think of me as a friend? I mean, I think I was on the Executive committee when she was chair of the faculty, but committees do not friendships make." She friended me back. Phew.

Then I started looking for colleagues outside Zenith. After a bit, I typed "Judith Butler" (who I have met, but do not really know) into the search engine.

Oh my god. In the first five pages I came up with nine Facebook sites dedicated to Judith Butler the philosopher (as opposed to Judith Butler of Leeds, England; Judith A. Butler of Wilmington, DE; or the Judith Butler who has posted a photo of her corgi as a profile picture, which is the kind of thing Marjorie Garber might do, but Judith Butler would not.)

There's the Free Judith Butler page. It claims to have Michel Foucault as one of its "friends," and states that "it's time to free her eminence Judith Butler from intempestive, systematic and unappropriate quotations, misunderstanding and misinterpreting discourses. let's set Judith free. now." (Sic.) There's one called Judith Butler Come To Our School that has only seven members and is somewhat neglected: my sense is that it is devoted only to the desire -- well, that Judith Butler pay them a visit. Or go teach them. Or something. But you know, come up with an honorarium and an invitation, and she probably would.

These are the more benign ones. The pages start to "cross the line," as my students would say (the full quote, in an exasperated voice, is, "But Professor Radical, where does it cross the line??") with a fan site, simply called Judith Butler, as if it were in fact her page, where one fan has written on the Wall, "I am amazed by the fresh and relevant theory of this amazing individual!!!" and another, from Chile, "Excelente página, con textos no solamente de Judith Butler." Then there is Judith Butler is My Homegirl, with 1,340 members, that seems to be a place where people go to link other websites and blogs devoted to -- you guessed it, Judith Butler -- and is also a kind of virtual hangout for genderqueer folk inspired by the early work of (sigh) Judith Butler. But whatever.

Slightly more offensive is Lovers of Judith Butler United: The Judith Butler Appreciation Society, the title of which implies that these people (all 51 of them) are Dr. Butler's ex-lovers. Or current lovers. But in fact, they are actually just "people who know that Judith Butler is the most amazing academic to grace the face of this earth. Anyone who thinks she talks a lot of shit in a stupid style can bog off because they are clearly just thick." I think these people are also British, given the slang. "Additionally," the site managers go on, "this society is for anyone that loves Jude's hairstyle and believes that she is the epitomy (sic!) of the subversive perfomer."

And then there are two more that I am not linking to because the titles are so hostile.

One thing that this odd phenomenon -- making a celebrity of a scholar so that you can trash her for being a celebrity -- caused me to think about was if anyone has written about 'zines as a kind of cultural prelude to blogging and social networking sites. Butler is the only academic I have ever known who has also been the subject of a satirical fanzine; because of this and the Facebook sites, she may become the first academic to be written about -- academically -- as a pop cultural phenomenon as well as a knowledge producer (although I bet Stanley Fish is right in line, and in the conclusion to his most recent book, Walter Benn Michaels has written about himself in the third person as if he were already a cultural phenomenon.) About fifteen years ago there was an undergraduate from the University of Iowa who went under the moniker "Miss Spentyouth." She published several issues of a xeroxed fanzine called Judy! that were reproduced and recirculated everywhere, much as one now links to other blogs, or quotes from them on one's own blog. At the time I thought Judy! was extremely funny, in part because I thought feminist literary theory was really important, but also often really absurd in its claims, vocabulary and syntax. Scholars would go into rooms, listen to utter gobbledygook written by the lowest graduate student to the fullest professor, and then walk out, having understood very little but looking anxiously at each other and saying "Wow, I wish I were that smart." So that's the cultural critique I thought Judy! was, as they say, performing.

As I understand it from a second or third-hand account that percolated through the Differences crowd (which leads me to believe it was true, since Butler was, and is, well-published there), Professor Butler did not think Judy! was funny at all. There was a little kerfuffle about it between issues I and II of the fanzine in a now defunct (probably because it was so hip) publication called Lingua Franca, in which Butler rebuked Miss Spentyouth and was rebuked in turn by others who accused her of not having a sense of humor. There was the panel I attended where Butler snapped at an anonymous graduate student, "Don't call me Judy!" (note: don't.) But as I indicated above, what was missed by all its critics was that the 'zine wasn't really about Butler at all: it was about the way poststructural theory and cults of personality had saturated the world of feminist intellectuals, and English studies in particular. So it could have been called Michel! or Jacques! and the same point would have been made.

And in retrospect, I suppose the issue at stake for many feminists, and I suspect Butler herself, was that it wasn't any of these men who were being lampooned, now was it?

But I actually think these Facebook pages take it to a whole new level, whether they are intentionally nasty or not. In part that is because they are so easy to put up, they distribute themselves via Google in a way no 'zine author could distribute her work, and they don't require the kind of attention to composition or actual wit that a 'zine relies on to persuade others to reproduce and distribute it spontaneously. Because of negative experiences I have had on the web (and this is only one example) they disturb even me, and I am disturbed by very little on the internet -- not even the e-mails I get from the conservative online newsletter Human Events that say things like "The Recession May Be Good for You" and "Secret Plan Behind Obama Move to the Right." And they bother me, I guess, because the last time I looked, Judith Butler was a real person (perhaps the point my acquaintances on Differences were making years ago) and not some phony symbol who makes herself available for trashing like Brangelina or Brittany by generating publicity for every private moment. The down side, or acceptable collateral damage, of this chosen life in public is that we all know every time a pound is gained or lost, a baby (or two) born, and a DWI traffic stop occurs. And while we academics who blog enter into a pact with the internet devils that means we may fall victim to a public trashing at a moment's notice, all Butler does is write, teach, publish and occupy the cutting edge of her field. And yet somehow she has become the object of ressentiment on a grand scale, undoubtedly because of the effect of the job market (particularly in English studies, where her work has been so influential) on the nerves of highly educated graduate students and adjuncts who are simultaneously over- and underemployed.

But what I think is even stranger, in a more abstract way, is when someone who studies culture becomes culture. In other words, if "Judith Butler" can be reproduced so easily, and her image and reputation bent to whatever iconoclastic purpose a given individual chooses (to draw on the work of Judith Butler, not to mention Walter Benjamin) -- is there really a "Judith Butler"?

*******************************************

*with apologies to the author for rampant theft of a classic title. Unless "the author" is actually dead. The author was dead, but since I haven't kept up with my reading in philosophy or literary theory, I don't know if the author is still dead.

The Return of the Radical: A Few Announcements

Well, vacation's over. That's the bad news. The good news is: vacation is about to begin! Yes, that time of year for which we all gave up the big bucks has arrived, the summer vacation. Of course, if you have an administrative job or two, as I do, there are always things to take care of over the summer: new faculty to get settled, post-docs to welcome, reports to write, searches to plan for, staff to oversee, budgets to finagle -- er, I mean close. But this time of year calls to mind why many of us chose this profession in the first place: intensive reading, whole days to spend writing, imagining the classes we will teach in the fall with perfect students in them who have not yet misunderstood us or done anything weird that takes days to unravel. And did I mention the reading?

I have a few things to do before leaving for the Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, which is meeting in Minneapolis June 12-15, so I plan to get back into the swing of blogging slowly: when I was in France, I wrote in a journal like I used to do before I blogged, and shifting back is peculiarly difficult. But I'd like to take the time to establish a few things that my readers can expect from Tenured Radical in the immediate future.

I will be blogging the Berks, and everything will be crossposted at Cliopatria. However, normal blog rules apply: I won't write about anything that isn't already public, and I will assume everything said to me is in confidence unless I am told otherwise. In return, please do not pester me with your desire to be reassured that I am not revealing your secrets. Other than the blogger ethic, you have two assurances that I will not write anything that is overly snide, critical or revealing while blogging the conference. One is my relationship with Ralph Luker, the coordinator and conscience of Cliopatria: every blogger needs an imaginary editor in hir head, and Ralph is mine. The other assurance is that, having finished watching the first season of Gossip Girl on the plane (God I love the video iPod!) I am reminded of that maxim taught so well by example in the Zenith History Department: secrets are more valuable and precious when kept. This allows for the possibility of deploying them at strategic moments - or better yet, creating a lasting, if cynical, bond with another person by continuing to keep them.

Just kidding. You know you love me. xoxo.

I am reading for the American Historical Association's Beveridge and Dunning Prizes this summer. This is public information, but I thought I should remind my readers of this anyway, because my normal reticence about commenting on what I am reading will increase. Despite the fact that I will be reading dozens of books published in 2007, the widget to the left, "Tenured Radical is Reading," will only feature books published before or after this seminal year. I am too jet lagged still to know why I think this is ethical, but I do.

This summer I will begin to accept, and answer, questions from the reading public. This is not normally something I do, despite my penchant for giving unasked for advice, in part because Dean Dad does it so well -- why compete with a clear leader in the field? But mostly I don't answer people's questions because of a peculiar and perverse personality trait I have: if someone asks me to do something specific it becomes a disincentive to do it, and I often don't. Hence that people have sent me good questions in the past and they have languished in my In Box. Conversely, when someone writes an utterly ridiculous and nasty anonymous comment I growl silently, "Game on, Anonymous 3:11!" and plunge into a pointless quarrel with someone I don't know. Other than the lack of vacations, this was yet another good reason why I couldn't become a lawyer: they would be hauling my client off to jail, and I would still be outside arguing with the security guard about my Swiss Army knife and the Second Amendment.

However intelligent people continue to ask me good questions. I have one sitting in my gmail account now that is perfect for next week's conference. Particularly in a summer where much of my creativity has to go into that boring old publish on paper thing, now is the time to begin taking advantage of other people's creativity if you ask me. So if you have a question for the blog, send it by email, and I'll do what I can.

Oh yeah -- and as for the commenter who noted acidly that I was going to Paris rather than sub-Saharan Africa on vacation: why would anyone -- radical or not -- vacation in a war zone rife with starvation, poverty, disease, and violent, free-booting militias who cut off your hands and feet? And what is the Harry Potter thing about? If only I were a wizard -- but alas, I am not. That's the other side of the family -- I'm one of the boring Potters.

Through the Looking Glass (And Back Again)

In the spirit of a request made by Cliopatra's Ralph Luker, I have removed an evening post that was in this space about my relations with a certain academic blogger and his followers, one that I wrote after deleting several days worth of ugly, pointless comments from the followers (who may be real people or not; it's hard to tell.) Ralph also wrote to said blogger about his behavior and asked him to desist: thank you, Ralph. In my reply to both of them, I noted that I expected this blogger to do be a gentleman and do the right thing on his side as well, removing three recent posts that have sparked a particularly nasty and violent set of remarks about me on his blog (including two posts that feature a puppet show where a Harry "Potter" puppet is blown up by a ticking time bomb), on my blog, and in two of my email accounts. Since we now know that this history colleague of mine has turned on Blogger's comment moderation function, we also know that he has actively approved these comments. My guess is that if past practice holds, the "ticking time bomb" posts will disappear, he will claim they were never there to begin with, and he will demand that I give him "evidence" that they ever were. For other critical opinions of what KC incites and tolerates among his resentful fans, see this post at Acephelous and this one, part of a series, at Re:harmonized.

My regular readers should know that comment moderation has also been turned on here. All comments that are decent will be activated; spiteful ones will be trashed. And yes, to anticipate the next group of nasty emails, it is my right and responsibility to do that: no editor of a print or electronic publication publishes everything that comes over the transom. Just because wild populism can exist in the blogosphere doesn't mean it should.

*******************************************

Morning update: In response, Ralph and I received the following message from the blogger - "It is not my custom to 'take down posts,' and I will not do so in this instance.

"It is, as I have said both publicly and in an e-mail to Prof. Potter, unfortunate that Prof. Potter elected to publish statements about the lacrosse players (and, of less relevance, then about me) that were demonstably untrue; and it is even more unfortunate that--when asked to produce evidence for those statements--Prof. Potter declined to provide any such evidence.

"That said, DIW is a blog about the lacrosse case, not about Claire Potter. If Prof. Potter no longer publishes false statements about the case, I can't imagine why I would ever have a reason to write about her, nor can I imagine that our paths would again cross--

KC"

So the answer to the question is: no. A person who is constantly insisting that other people apologize and retract things (that may have been implied, but not presented as fact, by things they wrote as a critical comment on a current event) does not apologize or retract things because he never does anything wrong. Other people do things that are wrong. And who decides what is right and wrong? He does, of course. And he never writes or tolerates comments that imply anything reprehensible, like that I might be blown up, for example, because months ago I made a passing reference, in a post about media representation and race, to a criminal case that he was writing a book about. And let me say, I think it is particularly chilling that he left these comments up, since he is currently living in Israel on a Fulbright, a place where people really do get blown up all the time, and it is one of the great tragedies of the time we are living in that all the people of the Middle East are not free from terrible, random violence, and that even people who survive these bombings will be damaged by them forever.

But although I have re-edited last night's post to reflect this blogger's refusal to compromise with anyone, I think Ralph's original point stands and I would like him to know that I, at least, am paying attention: this blog, and my public image, does not have to be soiled by pointless quarrels with people who do not know me nor I them. So after a few days of comment moderation, life will resume as normal on Tenured Radical.

Saigon. I'm Still In Saigon. Or, It Sucks To Work On My Book

I bet you all have been wondering: with all of the Radical's interests on display in the last month, is she really writing her book? What was all that fuss and bother about at the beginning of the summer? Has she just gone underground? Is there a book? Or is this "book" a blogosphere fiction?

Well the answer is, I am finishing my book. And it sucks. Utterly. It is like the last three weeks of pregnancy in August when, it has been my observation, it is relentlessly hot, peeing has become an hourly event, and my pregnant friends are weeping hysterically and saying, "Just cut it out, OK?" So in the interests of getting to work today (and not extending the childbirth metaphor), I would like to purge my mind of everything self-destructive, poisonous and distracting with the....(drum roll) "Four Reasons Why It Sucks To Work On My Book" post. I am giving you only the four top reasons (rather than the dozens that there really are) so that this does not take up the entire morning and so that you retain some respect for me.

Reason Number One:

It is July, and the summer is approximately half over. More than half over if you figure that on August 13 I am going to a lake in Minnesota for ten days, and when I get back, I will have to leap into school business immediately. Hence, there is enough time left to know that I can get most of the manuscript revised if I really apply myself in a reasonable way, and not enough time to actually know, for sure, that I will finish. Having done book-finishing once before, I know that I cannot package this up and send it away on Labor Day (ha -ha) without going through the kind of pain and anti-social isolation that a person of fifty simply can't muster the strength or will for anymore. Hence the agony may continue into September, when I had hoped to be book-free. I must come to terms with this possibility and keep writing at the same time, as if I were finishing. This sucks.

Reason Number Two:

This book is all about men in the nineteenth century, and my new project, where all my reading is focused, is about women -- feminists -- in the mid- to late twentieth century. This means that my secondary reading (focused on project 2) and my writing are fighting each other for supremacy in my brain. It's kind of like Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots, which is a violent game children of my generation played instead of Grand Theft Auto, and were equally vilified for by whatever parents caught us doing it. Here's an idea: what if I stopped writing my book and marketed a knock-off toy called "Rock 'em, Sock 'em Historians" and marketed it to graduate students at the AHA in January, with exchangeable bobble-heads of famous historians, past and present (which could be ordered - and paid for -- separately)? It's a concept, isn't it? And I bet I would make more money than I would make on this book. The amount of money I will make on the book will suck.



Reason Number 3:

It's getting hot, and that only aggravates my love-hate relationship to revising a manuscript that I would have been happy to publish two years ago to massively contradictory critical acclaim. But I have acquired too much creative and intellectual distance on it and its flaws have made themselves apparent in hideous and gruesome detail. So now I have to totally revise and restructure it so that I can at least have a chance of publishing something unique and different in the field that will cause people to talk about me in a wondrous way. So heat, or no heat, I am tromping through it line by hideous line, 'graph by hideous 'graph, and by the end of the day I am in an utterly foul mood and no fun to be around. And the ceiling fan is thumping overhead, causing me to imagine that I am Martin Sheen in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now: "This is the end/Beau-ti-ful Friend/This is the End...." The Horror. The Horror. Which is another way of saying: this sucks!

At least Martin Sheen eventually got to be President.

Reason Number 4:

If I abandon this book, I can never apply for a job or a fellowship again. If I finish this book now, I can apply for jobs, fellowships, a crown in heaven, a mortgage in another city, and a new passport for a trip to Paris next summer, for which we just purchased tickets with some of our three trillion airmiles. The balance of interests is clear: I must finish the book, whether I am having fun or not, whether it is summer or not, whether the war in Vietnam is a good idea or not. And I detest being in a position where anyone is telling me what to do, even if it is Fate telling me what to do. It totally sucks.

This should be a lesson to all of you: Never Get Out of the Boat.

Letter To An Anonymous Blogger

I just posted this as a comment on Tim Lacy's History and Education: Past and Present, and realized that, although it is part of an ongoing discussion Tim has been trying to spark about anonymous blogging, the post I attached it to was old enough that it might get a little lost. This is my own reflection on anonymity, and on having come out as a blogger. I have edited it a bit more because I am a compulsive re-writer; I have also not included a link to the blog under discussion so that no one is confused that it is a critique of that blogger. It isn't: this is a smart blog by a graduate student, with great posts, and you can find it over at Tim's place.

Dear Tim,

Thanks for sending AnonymousBlogger to my post about relinquishing my anonymity -- I do think anonymity raises ethical and practical issues that everyone at all ranks of the profession ought to think about on an ongoing basis, and not just those unprotected by tenure. As I reflect once more on my blogging life prior to my decision to give up anonymity, several things come to mind.

When we publish things anonymously that are incautious, and we are more likely to do that when we believe ourselves to be anonymous, there are immediate and sometimes long-term consequences for ourselves and for others. There's the equivalent of the flaming email phenomenon -- putting up a post in a fit of rage, or self-righteousness, or manic humor -- in other words, making a set of thoughts public in a way that doesn't engage one's own super-ego as it should. I know because I've done it, and I had to go back and edit or delete a bunch of stuff once I came out that seemed funny at the time (was, in fact) but was potentially hurtful since the humor depended on sarcasm or on exaggerating the characteristics of composite characters that real people were too likely to see as themselves. I remember at the time how differently I saw some of these posts once I had to imagine the reality of them being attached to my name, and to real people at Zenith. That change in perspective is a learning experience I have not forgotten.

But even when the posts are serious and accurate, I do think you need to ask yourself, before publishing something that is critical of others, would I stand up for this in public? After all, simply because something is the "truth" doesn't mean you should publish it. If you can't imagine saying such a thing to someone's face, or don't want to engage your own critics publicly, you probably shouldn't put something up on the web.

I want to emphasize that I personally don't feel critical of anonymous bloggers, and complications in my blogging life will not necessarily be problems on your blog. I am, after all, well known in my real life for taking all kinds of risks either to get a laugh, to make a teaching moment work in a memorable way or to get something done that I think is important. But assuming that your identity as a blogger is privileged information still means that you risk having to be personally accountable for what you write anyway. There is a high risk that some people will discover who you are eventually:it's clear to me that a number of anonymous bloggers' identities are well known to a circle of friends, for example. If you have been hiding your identity to avoid consequences or retaliation, that will be over in a flash when someone -- anyone -- who gets really angry at you wants it to be. And things could get really ugly -- people might know for months before you have any kind of tipoff and have re-thought your blogging ethic.

There are also intangible questions about how the people around you may perceive collegiality and professionalism. Whether what you have been posting is truthful or not, some people will think you have been dishonest in spirit if perhaps not in fact by recording and publishing things without their permission or without attribution. That really is damaging to a reputation, and you can't control the damage, because the people who will think that don't necessarily know you or want to know you. The ones who do know you may feel betrayed -- and this is drawn from my experience of discovery: a variety of people who knew me and thought I was a decent person felt puzzled and hurt when they thought I was blogging about them (when in fact I was not.) And that required a lot of straightening out -- from friends, to students to casual acquaintances -- and I am quite sure I will never really have an honest exchange with everyone who was upset or misperceived a post. Now that I am out, if someone is offended or thinks they have been written about, they can just drop me an email and we can straighten it out. If they don't, it's not because they can't, and it's a decision that I am not responsible for. More important, someone can look at me in a meeting or during a conversation and say, "I hope you aren't going to blog about this." And I can reassure them that I won't -- even if I want to!

Now I want to say that your blog, AnonymousBlogger, is a wonderful, thoughtful contribution as many anonymous blogs are, and I really love hearing things that graduate students and untenured people might be hesitant (afraid?) to tell me in my potential role as gatekeeper to success. These are things I need to know. But I have also been in the position of having been abused by anonymity and it has changed my view of it a bit. This may seem unfair or irrational, but I must warn you that there are many people -- if you are using your blog as a place to address charged topics -- who will simply think anonymity is cowardly. I certainly thought all the racist and anti-semitic stuff I got from the "anonymous" commenters in relation to the Duke lacrosse affair, in addition to being offensive, was deeply cowardly. And I continue to think that the historian who turned these people loose on me by posting my email address on his blog, behaved in a highly uncollegial, unprofessional and frankly, unethical, way by exposing me to what was not critique or criticism -- it was just crazy abuse, where anonymity became a weapon that he deployed through other people to punish and intimidate someone as an object lesson to others. So did HNN, in fact, where this person is listed as a regular contributer: they chided him in a column, and as far as I know he never responded to them. I know he never explained his actions to me.

The most serious problem from my point of view is that this person and I had a genuine difference about the content and meaning of my original post, and his took a great stretch of the imagination to either articulate as genuinely harmful or justify such a public, personal and vicious verbal assault. What the blogger and his cronies said I did, I did not do: I did not spread or make false charges about the students under indictment. Actually, I reported on coverage of the case, not the case itself, in the service of making an argument about race and culture that compared how those students were depicted in the press to another case. Frankly, even if I had made false charges against these students, it would have been without material consequence to them because I have no standing in their lives, their community or in the legal case. I was in no way responsible for the situation that brought on the press coverage in the first place, or Duke's decisions about how to deal with it. But the anonymous people attached to this blogger wrote emails and letters to my colleagues, officers of the university, trustees and to me: as I came to understand, they have also been sending abusive, obscene and racist email to members of the Duke faculty. Only when I began to investigate their real identities by filing complaints with their servers did they stop. I still don't know, because of the multiple anonymous comments and the accounts opened under pseudonyms, whether these were many real people, a couple real people, or whether it was just the blogger himself in a fit of paranoid rage and grandiosity. And not inconsequentially, although the blogger claims to be engaged in a campaign for justice that has held up factually in recent decisions in the Duke case, that he deliberately misinterpreted my post and fails to exercise any retraint over the "anonymous" comments to his own site, many of which seem to be from right-wing conspiracy theorists, frankly calls him into question as a scholar as well as a colleague in my view. As far as I can tell, he has one identity as a historian and another as the convener of a bizarre, right wing conspiracy group. And the two identities cannot help but overlap because they belong to the same person.

This is all a way of saying that the question of one's reputation, and one's responsibility for the reputation of others, is a very serious one indeed. It has many dimensions that anonymity makes very, very ethically complex. I don't want to be hard on you or any other anonymous blogger, because I'm not against anonymity in principle, but in no way should you feel that you are protected from the consequences of other people's perceptions of you because your name isn't on the blog, nor should you think you are immune from people making judgements about you that may be really unfair. It simply isn't so, and even if you wish to remain anonymous, you need to write as if you were not anonymous. And you need to police other people on your site who are anonymous, because no one knows that a comment written under another pseudonym, or by an anonymous commenter, isn't also *you.* That said -- as people advised me when I was pondering the question of coming out -- remaining anonymous is useful because it makes it harder for people to google you and have your blog come up before any of the articles and books you have written!

Good luck, and happy blogging, AnonymousBlogger: I will continue to read your blog which is, if I have not made this point sufficiently, very fine;

TR

One Thing Leads to Another: Blogging Dilemmas and the Sopranos Upcoming Finale

OK. So I was adding a final comment to the previous post, in which a Zenith student has raised some interesting issues about sexual identity and classroom dynamics in the Hallowed Halls, a conversation enriched by several contributions from Gayprof and Adjunct Whore. And as I was doing it, I was having the conflicted feelings I always experience when I end up writing in response to an issue that is specifically about students and life at Zenith. I can only express the attraction-revulsion dilemma this way: remember when Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, I believe in Godfather III, (having mistakenly thought he has taken the business entirely legit and cut his own ties with organized crime) snarls: "The family. Every time you think you have gotten away they reach out and suck you back in again." Godfather purists will forgive me, I hope, for having the quote, and possibly even the movie chapter, slightly wrong. But it is one of the down sides of being "out" as a blogger: one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place was to have a space in my life that was not governed by Zenith and its peculiar ways. And yet, inevitably, I am asked direct questions about very specific doings there, because students lurk on my blog, and they are actually interested in how things work and why. And part of me wants to say, look, this blog is not office hours. And part of me says, yes, you have a right to be interested in this, and it is a piece of why you are interesting to me that you care about these things, so I will do my best to answer your question. That's when I get sucked back in. Again.

I have no solution to this problem. I think it is, perhaps, My Fate. The topics of Fate and Family lead me to my real preoccupation-- the end of The Sopranos, my favorite television series, which is imminent, and something to which I can pay complete attention now that school has ended for the summer.

Last night, Bobby "Bacala" Bacalieri was killed, and Silvio was put into a probably irreversible coma. Tony is now holed up with Paulie Walnuts and a few other retainers in what I believe is Junior's old house, cuddling a nasty looking automatic weapon and probably watching his life pass before his eyes. N says she is sure Tony will be killed, an idea I am resisting. And before all this happened, Dr. Melfi dismissed Tony as a patient and AJ, Tony's pathetic excuse for a son, was only able to respond to the threats against his family by blubbering, "How am I supposed to maintain with all this going on?" His father, rightly, picked him up out of bed and threw him into the closet.

I know there is going to be a shriek of horror from a lot of bloggers out there who actually know what they are talking about, but this is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy in my book. I was immediately reminded of the several stagings of Macbeth I have seen in which the damned trees really do start walking and Macbeth goes down alone. As he has known he will. As we *all* know we will. In other words, I am well-educated enough to understand that this is how it must be, but I am devastated all the same. Moreover, unlike Shakespeare, who had all of English history to draw on (as well as a lot of excuses to make for the Tudor monarchy) and was, therefore, always ready for a sequel or prequel to be commissioned, part of what the Sopranos' producers are doing is ensuring that the series can never, ever be revived.

And yet, must everybody die? Even Paulie Walnuts? And at the hands of Phil Leotardo, a man whose family, as Phil himself once memorably said, was mistakenly named at Ellis Island "after a ballet costume?" I know the New Jersey bunch are all murderers themselves, but it seems hardly fair to ask all of us to have bonded with Tony, his crew and his family, over the years and then make us all watch them die. And yes, I get it that part of the point may be making us all shift our ethical perspective and understand that our pleasure in watching the show has made us complicit in some terrible way: just as complicit as Carmella who, for all her pain over Tony's infidelities, has neatly compartmentalized how she profits from his "business;" just as complicit as Meadow, who hopes to go on to law school and work for social justice, paid for by her father's blood money.

This would be the point in the post to say that my preferred ending is that Meadow will step up at the last minute, help her father take charge, and take over as consiglieri, an idea I am sure I should take to therapy myself, along with how pissed I am at Dr. Melfi for cutting her ties to Tony at such a crucial moment.

I probably realized the depths of my own complicity a few episodes back when Christopher Moltosanti, having once again slipped back into his personal hell of drug and alcohol addiction, rolled his car and was bleeding to death. He looked up at his uncle and said: "Help me, Tone." Tony reached over and squeezed Christopher's nostrils shut, suffocating him (and significantly, leaving no clear heir to leadership in the family, a role to which Christopher had revealed himself as deeply unsuited over the course of several seasons.) Of all my friends, I was the only person who believed that Tony was doing exactly what Chris was asking him to do. I guess I'll take that one to therapy too.

In the end, when these television programs become so important, the endings can never be satisfying: Mary Richards turning the lights off in the studio; the last helicopter taking off from the MASH camp; that weird final episode of "Seinfeld" where everyone ends up in jail, a grim commentary on how trapped they were as actors by the success of the series. My least favorite was the end of "Queer As Folk." This was a series I loved because it allowed me to stay in touch with the pleasures of a queer community I left behind in New York (not to mention with my twenties) and could never have in Zenith or Shoreline; ultimately you could say it foundered because not even TV characters can stay young forever. This otherwise fabulous show ended with homophobes blowing up Babylon, the disco - sex club, and all the characters retreating into marriage, affluence, parenthood and middle age. The lesbians, having survived infidelities of various kinds, moved to Canada with their babies, where life was supposedly safe from the effects of homophobia. Yuck.

Really successful television programs can mark off a whole historical period in a person's life, which I suppose is why their endings are such important cultural events. When the Sopranos began, I was living in Zenith, had not yet gotten tenure or finished my first book, and was geting the first seasons on videotape at Blockbuster. So in a sense, Tony and I grew into middle age together. And he is going to die, and leave me to deal with what comes next by myself?

The bastard.

On the other hand, the new season of Big Love starts next Sunday. And in a polygamous Mormon family, you are never really alone.